House of Eratosthenes

The backstory begins with a government boondoggle spanning decades and running billions of dollars overbudget. The present-day story begins with an entirely avoidable fatality, and the project architect resigning in disgrace. And yet, before it’s over, the squabbling diminishes into a finger-pointing contest over whether an antiquated term may be used as a racial epithet or not.

Yeah that’s right, it starts with a woman getting killed, and it ends with people running to their dictionaries with phony righteous indignation.

You say, Freeberg, what are you smokin’ and can I have some? Politicians don’t get into arguments over innocent people getting killed, and end up nit-picking over arcane tidbits of slang, over supposed derogatory racial implications.

Well, um…actually, yeah. Yeah, they do.

Governor Mitt Romney yesterday apologized for using the expression “tar baby” — a phrase some consider a racial epithet — among comments he made at a political gathering in Iowa over the weekend.

“The governor was describing a sticky situation,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor’s spokesman. “He was unaware that some people find the term objectionable, and he’s sorry if anyone was offended.”

In his first major political trip out of the state since a ceiling collapse in a Big Dig tunnel killed a Boston woman on July 10, Romney told 200 people at a Republican lunch Saturday about the political risks of his efforts to oversee the project.

“The best thing for me to do politically is stay away from the Big Dig — just get as far away from that tar baby as I possibly can,” he said in answer to a question from the audience.

The expression “tar baby” has had different meanings over the years.

A definition from Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary traces the expression to the tar baby that trapped Br’er Rabbit in an Uncle Remus story by Joel Chandler Harris, which became popular in the 19th century. The dictionary now defines the expression as “something from which it is nearly impossible to extricate oneself.”

But it also has been used as a pejorative term for dark-skinned blacks.

In 1981, author Toni Morrison published a novel titled “Tar Baby,” and she has compared the expression to other racial epithets. She says it’s a term that white people used to refer to black children, especially black girls.

Reached at her home near Princeton University, where she teaches, Morrison called the expression “antiquated” and one that’s “attractive to some people, when they begin to search for hints of racism.”

She described it as a “forbidden word” that she sought to restore to its original meaning, one that illuminated an old African tale about the connection between a master and slave.

“How it became a racial epithet, I don’t know,” she said. “It was my attempt to rescue the phrase from its low meaning. I wanted to annihilate the connotation and return the meaning to its origins. Apparently, I haven’t succeeded.”

Now, that was not subtle at all, and I hope you caught it. The reference material that qualifies the slang term for its negative qualities as a derogatory epithet — the only one mentioned in this article — was constructed in an effort to restore the term to its stature of relative respectability and harmlessness. Apparently, it failed.

For the record, there is a specific story involved in the “tar baby.” It really was a ball of tar, wrapped up in baby clothes. Brer Wolf left it out in the open for Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit got his paw (hand) stuck in the tar baby’s face when he went to smack it. You see, the precursor to Bugs Bunny got pretty huffy-puffy when that insolent baby refused to answer his questions, so he chose to smack it. Of course, his paw got stuck. So Brer Rabbit told the baby to let go. Of course, the baby just sat there. So he smacked the baby with his other paw. Now, Brer Rabbit has two paws stuck to the baby. And he’s getting madder and madder…and, of course, the baby still isn’t talking to him. So he takes his rabbit foot…well anyway, you can see where that’s going.

You can also see the applicability of this old legend to political life, especially with regard to overly-expensive construction projects that kill people. “Tar baby,” it turns out, is not only a wonderful phrase, but it’s irreplaceable. Something is a tar baby; you start messing with it; you getting stuck becomes a “when,” not an “if.” It is pre-ordained from the moment you start messing with it. And furthermore, when problems arise, and you start trying to sort through them, your efforts to sort through them pre-ordain yet more problems.

Two words, three syllables, that describe all this stuff, which pertain to so many things in public-sector work. Tar. Baby. It turns out that when Gov. Romney made the comment for which he would later apologize, he was being prophetic. In getting nailed on this artificially-ambiguous phrasing, he is demonstrating how correct he was. The damn thing’s a tar baby. To simply touch it, is to get in trouble, and to try to get out of the trouble, is to get in more trouble.

What a great slang term. In the racially-neutral form, that is. “Conundrum” simply doesn’t do. “Dilemma” doesn’t cut it. “Kerfuffle” doesn’t get it said. Even “Phusterkluck” somehow falls short.

I look at it this way: It would be a litmus test, generous to the offended parties to a demonstrable fault, to say, just find me a witness. Find me someone who will affirm, in an affidavit, or on merely unsworn testimony in a town square, that he, himself, is offended by the term. No proxies. Just find me, let’s say, three people. Three people willing to say “I, myself, am offended by this term and I am willing to say so” and then let us proceed with putting Gov. Romney in the ducking-stool, or get him ready for pie-in-the-face, or whatever else we want to do with him.

That would be extravagantly generous, as a standard for offense.

And yet, this article fails it. Once again…we have advocates, winning face time in front of the cameras and the microphones, being offended on behalf of someone else.

As for Romney’s use of the expression, Pastor William E. Dickerson of the Greater Love Tabernacle in Dorchester called it “a poor choice of words.”

“There are some words that we should eradicate from our vocabulary, so we don’t use them inappropriately,” he said. “Saying someone is a ‘tar baby’ is like calling them the black sheep of the family. Kids with darker skin were often teased, and they would cringe at hearing it. That’s why we should avoid it, especially a public servant.”

Pastor Dickerson, that’s a great argument! Or…it would be, if there was a substitute term that provided all of the connotations provided by “tar baby.”

Or…if someone could be found, who would give a non-anonymous, on-the-record, first-hand interview about how they, personally, were offended. Not someone else. They. Speak on your own behalf, or shut your pie-hole.

Or…if some more substantial evidence could be found, to indicate that this is indeed a racist term, or was one.

Or…if we were talking about something in which an innocent woman wasn’t killed for Chrissakes. Good heavens. Billions of dollars have been poured into this big ol’ pig-in-a-poke, and now it’s falling apart getting people squished. I would think the phony racial-epithet-bickering could wait for another day.

You just can’t write fiction like this. No responsible publisher would accept it.

Update: The Whore is similarly peeved.

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Fiction You Couldn’t WriteTuesday, August 1st, 2006

Fiction You Couldn’t Write
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006